PHP

What Is PHP

What Is PHP

PHP is a language that has outgrown its name. It was originally conceived as a set

of macros to help coders maintain personal home pages, and its name grew from its

purpose. Since then, PHP's capabilities have been extended, taking it beyond a set

of utilities to a full-featured programming language, capable of managing huge

database-driven online environments.

As PHP's capabilities have grown, so too has its popularity. According to NetCraft

(http://www.netcraft.com), PHP was running on more than 1 million hosts in

November 1999. As of February 2000, that figure had already risen to 1.4 million

hosts. According to E-Soft, PHP is the most popular Apache module available,

beating even ModPerl.

PHP is now officially known as PHP: HyperText Preprocessor. It is a server-side

scripting language usually written in an HTML context. Unlike an ordinary HTML

page, a PHP script is not sent directly to a client by the server; instead, it is parsed

by the PHP binary or module. HTML elements in the script are left alone, but PHP

code is interpreted and executed. PHP code in a script can query databases, create

images, read and write files, talk to remote servers— the possibilities are endless.

The output from PHP code is combined with the HTML in the script and the result

sent to the user.